Why Donald Trump and Jeb Bush Should See “Hamilton”

Lin-Manuel Miranda in the title role of the musical “Hamilton,” at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, on Broadway. The show’s cast album now is available on iTunes.

Photograph by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux

Hillary Clinton is, so far, the only declared Presidential candidate known to have seen “Hamilton”: she attended a performance of the show at the Public Theatre, in March, to which she responded with evident delight. The musical—as the world knows by now—draws on rap, pop, jazz, and a variety of other musical genres to tell the story of Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, tracing the arc of his life from his illegitimate birth in poverty, in the Caribbean, to his death, in a duel, at the hands of Aaron Burr, the sitting Vice-President. The show, which was composed and written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also takes the title role, was conceived at the start of Barack Obama’s Presidency; its transfer to Broadway, this summer, coincided with the beginning of the end of the Obama years. With its youthful, almost entirely non-Caucasian cast, and its celebration of the possibilities inherent in building a new nation, the poetry of “Hamilton” is a reminder of the gleaming sense of hope that the election of 2008 engendered—still salutary to recall, despite some inevitable disappointment at the reality of prosaic governance during the past seven years.

The remaining candidates can now listen to “Hamilton,” even if they are too busy visiting Iowa to make a trip to Manhattan: today sees the iTunes release of the “Hamilton” cast album, executive-produced by the Roots, with the CD version to follow in October. This week, NPR has been streaming all two hours, twenty-two minutes, and thirty-five seconds of it on its Web site. Hip-hop aficionados have been scanning the songs for embedded references, while Miranda—whose protean talents include a mastery of the art form known as Twitter—has been retweeting amateur listeners’ efforts at singing snatches of his songs, under the hashtag #Hamiltunes.

For the large field of candidates who think themselves fit to run the country, the history of Hamilton—and the history of “Hamilton”—makes the album well worth playing while driving along in the campaign R.V., or at least worth delegating to a bright young staff member to listen to. (Among many other things, “Hamilton” is a celebration of the bright young staff member: it was as General George Washington’s military secretary in the Revolutionary War that the unknown, unconnected Hamilton first rose to any degree of power.) The show will certainly not appeal to all: John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, is on record as having found a CD by the Roots so offensive that he threw it in the trash, a surprisingly wasteful act for a fiscal conservative. And Chris Christie, the pugnacious governor of New Jersey, has plenty of reason not to be amused by the show’s comic-derogatory references to his state: “Everything is legal in New Jersey,” Hamilton and his son, Philip, sigh in unison, before the latter heads off to fight a duel on the western bank of the Hudson. For others, though, the way that the show filters the concerns of the late eighteenth century through the lens of the twenty-first could make for enlightening listening.

Prior to Miranda’s reimagining, Hamilton’s most recent efflorescence in popular or political culture, a decade or so ago, was as a hero to neoconservatives. Then, Hamilton was embraced by the likes of David Brooks, the Times’s neocon opinionizer, and Richard Brookhiser, whose 1999 biography celebrated Hamilton as the founding father of American capitalism. Miranda, by contrast, offers an Alexander Hamilton who speaks for the ninety-nine per cent, not the plutocracy. “The have-nots are gonna win this,” he predicts in a melodious interaction with Bishop Samuel Seabury, King George III’s loyal representative, near the beginning of the show. (Hamilton goes on to chastise Seabury: “Don’t modulate the key and not debate with me!” he insists, a line that encapsulates the show’s knowing interplay between musical form and political content.) Candidates who have sought to learn from the neoconservative agenda of the nineteen-nineties, such as Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, should take note. Miranda’s Hamilton is always a man of the people, even when he’s striving to establish the nation’s first bank.

In the person of Aaron Burr, the show poses the dilemma of the political aristocrat. Belonging to the Colonial cultural élite by birthright, Burr, as incarnated by the silky Leslie Odom, Jr., is constantly balancing the desire to serve his own ambition with the pressure to honor his legacy. “My mother was a genius / My father commanded respect / When they died they left no instructions / Just a legacy to protect,” goes Burr’s “I am” song, “Wait For It.” Burr’s dilemma might be a familiar one for Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida. As the son and brother of former presidents, Bush is this season’s preëminent legacy candidate—albeit one whose parents are still around, and occasionally issuing unhelpful instructions: Bush’s mother told reporters a couple of years ago that the country had “had enough Bushes.”

Miranda’s father, Luis Miranda, Jr., is a long-established Democratic political operative, which informs the way the show gleefully depicts the hypocrisies of political campaigning. “Talk less. Smile more,” is Aaron Burr’s advice to the hotheaded Hamilton when they first meet, in 1776. Burr is still saying the same thing in the Presidential election of 1800, when he actually runs for office, rather than standing for it in apparent disinterest. “I’m going door to door!” Burr tells Hamilton. “Honestly, it’s kind of draining,” he adds, a sentiment that Scott Walker might have sympathy with. Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of the race earlier this week, due to lackluster fund-raising. “We didn’t have a spending problem, we had a revenue problem,” was how Walker’s campaign manager,Rick Wiley, defended his own actions, a line that could have come from a satire about a flailing political campaign.

“He seems approachable..?” “Like you could grab a beer with him!” is how two members of the public discuss the aspiring Presidential candidate Burr in “Hamilton”—applying the lowest-common-denominator measure of acceptability that recurs in every contemporary campaign. Less than a year ago, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, was publicly fretting that his party needed to nominate a candidate “who someone actually wants to have a beer with,” a stipulation which, if taken literally, at least would rule out Mike Huckabee, the author and commentator, who generated controversy when he told CNN that he neither drinks, swears, nor listens to “classical music or opera—not my cup of tea,” by way of explaining his opposition to gay marriage. Huckabee’s campaign has been characterized by a tone-deafness masquerading as real talk, as when, last month, he criticized the “Black Lives Matter” movement for “elevating some lives above others.” “Hamilton,” with its predominantly black and Latino cast, exposes and detonates the privilege that underlies attitudes like Huckabee’s—never more than in the moment when Jefferson, played by the African-American rapper Daveed Diggs, receiving a letter from Washington in which he is summoned to become secretary of state, airily delegates it: “Sally be a lamb, darlin’, wont’cha you open it?”

“Hamilton” repeatedly shows the political risks of speaking one’s mind: Hamilton’s own career in government comes to an end when he publishes a pamphlet criticizing the newly elected President John Adams: “Sit down, John, you fat motherf-” is Miranda’s concise summary of its contents. This year’s Presidential field includes one candidate, Donald Trump, the reality-show star and real-estate mogul, from whom such an approach would not be entirely surprising, though if he were to say such a thing about any rival, he would likely tweet it to his 4.27 million followers, appending a spurious “best wishes.” It’s surprisingly easy to see how certain themes of “Hamilton” might resonate for Trump. Hamilton is a scrappy self-made man, confident of his own cleverness, and disdained by the political élites for his vulgarity: “Smells like new money, dresses like fake royalty,” is how Jefferson, foppish and scheming, disparages him. Trump, never shy to announce his own intelligence or to pronounce upon his own accomplishments, might well have the vanity to identify with Miranda’s incandescent hero.

To do so, though, would be contrary to the nativist demagoguery by which Trump has thus far propelled himself to prominence. Both at the Public Theatre and on Broadway, audiences have whooped at one moment in the show: when, about to fight the Battle of Yorktown, Hamilton and his French ally, the Marquis de Lafayette—also played by Daveed Diggs—high-five each other over their revolutionary accomplishments and declare “Immigrants, we get the job done.” It’s a feel-good moment for the well-heeled Broadway audience; and there are probably some seats at the Richards Rodgers Theatre occupied by people who, like John Kasich, might resort to citing conversations with the workers hired to clean up after them when asked about the economic prowess of Hispanic-Americans. But that doesn’t diminish the chord that the line strikes with audiences, nor does it negate the potency of the enthusiastic response to it.

“Hamilton” is a hymn to the allure that America promises the immigrant who aspires to reach its shores; it is also an argument for the invigorating power that this nation’s porous borders, and porous identity, have always offered. (This week, the Timesreported that the nonpartisan National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had issued the results of a study which showed that immigrants to the U.S. during the past two decades were assimilating to conform to broader cultural norms no less rapidly than did earlier generations of immigrants—including those of Trump’s Scottish mother and of his German grandparents.) Miranda made a few changes to the script between the Public run and the Broadway opening; one is at a moment at which Jefferson, Madison and Burr are seeking to undermine Hamilton’s political career. “Ya best g’wan run back where ya come from,” they tell him, in an echo of the vile rhetoric that has characterized the current campaign. Just as “Hamilton” casts a retrospective gloss upon the Obama years that birthed it, the musical also looks forward to 2016 and beyond, in which the story of America—“you great unfinished symphony,” as Hamilton calls the country in his dying moments—is still being written. Any candidate who ignores its message will be woefully behind the times.

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Peter Rosenberg’s 45s

Peter Rosenberg is a rap purist and a d.j. on the radio station Hot 97. These days, many d.j.s don’t actually d.j.—some play sets straight from iTunes; others act more like record producers, or commentators—but Rosenberg still has a thing for vinyl.